Review: "Lola at Last" by J.C. Peterson

 

Lola at Last by J.C. Peterson
Published February 2023 via HarperTeen
★★★★

Things are not going well for Lola Barnes.

On paper, Lola has it made. She's recently returned from a year in France, she's prepared to do whatever it takes to reclaim her queen bee spot at her California school, and her family is in a position—financial and otherwise—to fund whatever adventures she can dream up.

But paper doesn't always match reality, and Lola is still feeling the sting of the events that saw her whisked off to France. Now she's home (no more the French sophisticate than she was to begin with) her former friends don't want to rekindle their friendship, and oh, there's the little matter of accidentally setting a boat on fire. A boat that turns out to belong to Lola's brother-in-law. And any plans Lola had for the summer, or for regaining her popular-party-girl reputation, are well and truly sunk.

Now, I'll be honest: I read Being Mary Bennet last year, and when I saw that Peterson had followed up with Lydia/Lola's story, I flung the book bodily onto my to-read shelf without reading the rest of the description. (It's a risky move, but when it pays off...) So you can imagine my delight when it turned out that Lola's punishment/last-ditch effort at forcing her to build some character involved a summer of hiking and camping and learning to set sanctioned fires. Be still my beating heart. (This sounds sarcastic, but it's not—truly, give me all the books where the characters spend their time tromping about in the woods. Better, give me a tent and some woods without wild boars to read those books in.)

Be warned: Lola is exhausting. She has to be exhausting, mind, because she's Lydia Bennet incarnate, and if she were anything other than exhausting—and energetic, and petty, and shallow—she'd be a disappointment. It's a story best read after setting aside the need to love the protagonist from beginning to end. But Peterson walks a masterful line here, allowing Lola to be all of those things (some of them right to the end of the book) while also allowing Lola the complexity that comes with self-awareness, and loyalty, and (eventually) genuine desire to be something other than the story that has been written for her. Plus, Lola is self-aware enough to be funny, and that alone makes up for a multitude of sins. Did not disappoint.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.